Thursday 14 August 2008 19.01 EDT
First published on Thursday 14 August 2008 19.01 EDT

Even a record collection has dog days; weeks when your music seems to weigh too close. All those familiar voices breathing familiar air, all those tunes grown clammy, those verses that cling, suddenly, to your skin. These are the days when the music won't break, when you crave a new song like heavy rain.

The track that nudges its way into my head at these times is Van Morrison's TB Sheets, a song I have always associated with that muggy state of mind. It's the tale of a man stuck in the room of a dying woman friend - "And I can almost smell your TB Sheets," he sings, and sniffs the air "on your sick-bed." At more than nine-and-a-half minutes, it is a song that doesn't so much play as ooze, that winds you up in a feverish, Otis Redding-style delirium, with that groggy-sounding organ, that raving harmonica, that rattlesnake shake of a tambourine. And above it all, in that stifled voice, Morrison singing about how "the sunlight shining through the crack in the window pane/ Numbs my brain, oh, Lord."

It isn't a song with universal appeal. After all, it is long and dizzying, with disconcerting subject matter. It also had the misfortune of first appearing on Morrison's debut solo record, 1967's Blowin' Your Mind, which was contentious in itself: recorded in just two days and compiled and released without Morrison's permission, it featured arguably the most nauseating cover art in history - "I saw the cover and I almost threw up, you know," was what Morrison thought of it.

Greil Marcus, no great fan of Blowin' Your Mind, apparently referred to the song as the "sprawling, sensation-dulling TB Sheets". Others were more enthusiastic: "Transfixed between pure rapture and anguish. Wondering if they may not be the same thing, or at least possessed of an intimate relationship," wrote Lester Bangs in Stranded, a 1979 collection of desert-island music writing. "In TB Sheets, his last extended narrative before making [Astral Weeks], Van Morrison watched a girl he loved die of tuberculosis. The song was claustrophobic, suffocating, monstrously powerful, 'innuendos, inadequacies, foreign bodies'. A lot of people couldn't take it; the editor of this book [Marcus] has said that it's garbage, but I think it made him squeamish."

I'm with Bangs on this one; It is monstrously powerful. I can't think of a more claustrophobic song. Throughout it all, the singer is craving some kind of escape: "So open up the window and let me breathe," he cries, "I said, open up the window and let me breathe." And there rages a tug of war between the patient who wants him to stay - "Please stay, I wanna, I wanna/ I want a drink of water, I want a drink of water/ Go in the kitchen get me a drink of water ..." - and the visitor who wants to leave: "Gotta go," he declares to the sick-bed and the sunlight and the smell of the sheets. "Gotta few things gotta do..." All he seems able to offer as he leaves is the respite that music might bring: "I turned on the radio, if you wanna hear a few tunes/ I'll turn the radio on for you."

It was this tune that was in my head a week or two ago, when my entire record collection seemed to sag and sigh, when nothing new that I heard brought any relief, when I wanted to open up the window and breathe. A friend sent me a Youtube recording of Bon Iver and Bowerbirds singing Sarah Siskind's Lovin's for Fools. In Siskind's hands it is a winsome country track about a woman who tells her man to go and love his mistress, she plays it both broken and defiant, in that beautifully distraught Nashville way. But given to Bon Iver and Bowerbirds it is made into something singular and unwonted.

It is the closing track of a show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, the collected band members clustered on the brink of the stage, beginning with just an acoustic guitar. Up soars the Bon Iver falsetto before the voice of Phil Moore from Bowerbirds enters, peculiar and plaintive: "Maybe you'll find me, walkin' the garden/ Looking for something pure ..."

Two minutes in, the band join in for the chorus, an extraordinary combination of harmonies, a damp, swollen sound: "So go on and love her/ Love her forever/ I will not tell her/ I told you to/You'll never know dear/ How much I love you/ Lovin's for fools, lovin's for fools." After the musical doldrums of the last few weeks, the song was like fresh, wet air. As Siskind put it: "Seems like the window's finally open." Or perhaps, as TB Sheets had it: "The cool room, Lord, is a fool's room."